A garmenture is a "garment without precedent." The project was purposely vague, but essentially it was a materials exploration exercise, but in the end you need to create something that could be "worn," in the sense that it had some intimate relationship with the body – your body, in particular. Coming from an engineering background, I found this extremely abstract project rather difficult, but I persisted and things turned out a little OK.

Through some materials investigation, I settled on melted polyester. Polyester fabric, for those who don't know, is actually just pop-bottle plastic that has been melted and drawn into thread that's then woven into fabric; melting the fabric glassifies the material and you get plastic again. However, it gets interesting when the stuff plastic-ey parts are meshed with the unmelted, flexible regular fabric.


Polyester fabric in its unmelted (left) and melted forms.

I made many things, and everyone was infatuated with the material, which overshadowed anything interesting that I might be able to do with the material. Here's a movie of something neat:

Archinect won't let me upload movies (yet). Here's a link to it on my server: www.zeibin.com/public/z-garm-squish.mov

In the end, my followthrough sucked. I knew it, and in the crit, those critiquing wanted to say it but seemed to hold back because the material was, well, so very cool. It was to the extent where, at one point, I was the one putting the negative terms in the critics mouths because they weren't spitting them out fast enough.

Anyway, given these remarkable material properties, I wanted to use the material to emphasize the movement of the body, in an action/reaction sense: the body pushes against the material and the material pushes against the body, in a relationship of mutual awareness. Lame, I know. But whatever, here it is, in all its lame glory (I'm so embarrassed):



There were some fantastic projects here and there. Crit day was fairly rushed, so I didn't get any pics, but there was a giant fashion show for us to all show off our fancy style. I'm sure someone has pics somewhere... For the event, I wore my giant hat: